What a week! I was thrilled to have a chance to confront Nick Clegg but my excitement was tempered with disappointment that neither Cameron nor Miliband agreed to take part — although both were invited. I’d love to have challenged Miliband about the effects of uncontrolled immigration: wage compression, for instance, and the erosion of job opportunities within working-class communities. Why did he chicken out? My bet is he knows these facts are unanswerable. Cameron is, by all accounts, having kittens about Ukip but I think I can set his mind at rest. Our current wave of support seems to be thanks to working-class former Labour voters, which makes perfect sense. An excellent new book by Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, Revolt on the Right, explains that these sensible working-class voters feel alienated from Labour but unable to vote Tory. So poor old Cameron can’t blame Ukip any more for his failing fortunes.
But back to the debate with the man who did show up. At the time, after our first tussle, I was very pleased that the YouGov poll showed Ukip in the lead by 57 per cent to 36 per cent. What I later found out was that the result was actually about 68/25 but the sample was re-weighted. This was, I was told, because a high proportion of ‘older people’ answered the poll. The pollster therefore imagined the result was skewed. However I have an alternative term for these ‘older people’ that YouGov seems to think unrepresentative. I call them voters.
Perhaps the biggest surprise to me in these debates has been the realisation that it isn’t just the political classes we are up against, it’s virtually the entire commentariat, too. In the spin room, it was clear to my press team that most of the media were desperate to write up a Clegg win — even those working on newspapers that are supposedly hostile to the Lib Dems.
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